Kids rely too much on their computers

Published 9:00 pm Tuesday, November 25, 2003

Regarding the Nov. 15 article, “State schools chief looks beyond testing”: nine out of 10 Blue Ridge Elementary students in Walla Walla are low income and seven out of 10 are Hispanic. Low-income or Hispanic has nothing to do with low WASLs. It’s a cop-out to poor teaching standards. Of course low-income students can’t afford a computer to do homework. But what happened to all of us old-timers who got reading, writing, arithmetic and geography?

I went to school in the 1940s with a lot of kids from Poland, Italy, Germany and the British Isles. The kids passed without special education and learned to read and write English like the rest of us.

The school teachers say they are overworked and have too many students, but it boils down to lack of education on the teachers’ side.

Go back to the basics and give kids an education. The world of computers has gone too far. We need our kids to be educated on how to solve problems without computers.

Everett